SPCMSC Scientists Co-Author Meta-Analysis of the Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD) Microbiome
SPCMSC Research Microbiologist Dr. Christina Kellogg and Research Marine Biologist Dr. James Evans, along with fellow USGS scientist W. Bane Schill (Eastern Ecological Science Center) and numerous other collaborators, contributed to a study analyzing data combined from almost all currently existing SCTLD microbiome studies.
Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) is a highly destructive disease currently devastating reefs throughout Florida and the wider Caribbean. The pathogen responsible for this disease is currently unknown, but bacteria are hypothesized to play some role due to the success of antibiotics in treating disease lesions. In the largest effort to date to understand bacterial communities associated with the disease, SPCMSC scientists Kellogg and Evans, along with fellow USGS scientist Schill (Eastern Ecological Science Center) and numerous other collaborators, took part in a meta-analysis encompassing data from nearly all existing studies analyzing SCTLD-associated bacterial communities. Analyzed datasets included bacterial community data from healthy and diseased coral tissue and mucus, seawater, and sediments, and included both field-based and aquaria studies. This study represents the largest meta-analysis of coral disease microbiome data ever performed and identified several bacterial groups, including Rhodobacterales and Peptostreptococcales-Tissierellales, that seemed to drive the differences between healthy and diseased corals. The paper, titled “A meta-analysis of the stony coral tissue loss disease microbiome finds key bacteria in lesions and unaffected tissue of diseased colonies” has been published in ISME Communications.
Read what else is new at the St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center.
Related Content
Coral Reef Ecosystem Studies (CREST)
Related Content
- Science
Coral Reef Ecosystem Studies (CREST)
The specific objectives of this project are to identify and describe the processes that are important in determining rates of coral-reef construction. How quickly the skeletons of calcifying organisms accumulate to form massive barrier-reef structure is determined by processes of both construction (how fast organisms grow and reproduce) and destruction (how fast reefs break down by mechanical...
Get Our News
These items are in the RSS feed format (Really Simple Syndication) based on categories such as topics, locations, and more. You can install and RSS reader browser extension, software, or use a third-party service to receive immediate news updates depending on the feed that you have added. If you click the feed links below, they may look strange because they are simply XML code. An RSS reader can easily read this code and push out a notification to you when something new is posted to our site.